I actually parachuted in and out of EDUCAUSE, and I was my usual strange self at conferences. I really can’t seem to bring it together when I go to these things, my head space gets a bit confused and I withdraw a bit. I’m going to have to work on this. The session Gardner and I co-presented on Educational Publishing Platforms went pretty well, and that was all Gardner’s doing, He was in his best impromptu mode and he carried me beautifully through the presentation, for I was admittedly not on my game at all. The highlight, however, was a recorded conversation Gardner and I had later on Wednesday with Gerry Bayne about EDUPUNK. It was kind of a last minute arrangement, and it turned about to be a raucous, free-wheeling conversation that covered a tremendous amount of ground over the course of an hour. It’s after discussions like that that you know you are talking with a great teacher and an extremely generous intellectual soul. I’ll be looking back fondly on that moment for a while hereafter.

There is one more highlight that I am almost scared to admit, I was completed transfixed by the vendor section. It was huge and salespeople were hawking their wears in some crazy ways. The first cat I saw when I walked in was an HP salesman with a bright yellow blazer who was performing his pitch like a circus act. I then headed right over to the BlackBoard booth to find out how “Web 2.0″ NG would prove to be, and from what I saw it is just a little bit of ajaz with a single-sign on adapter that provides links to Sakai and Moodle courses—what a strange reason to proclaim your openness so boldly before the first day of the conference, again! Nonetheless, I couldn’t help myself. And once I was in the commercial Gulf Stream I couldn’t stop thinking about that scene in Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) wherein Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is walking around the various booths at a Surveillance Convention talking to random people, while at the same time you can see he is all at once visibly estranged, paranoid, and fascinated by the space he is wandering through. In fact, it is that walk through the vendor exhibits at EDUCAUSE that may stick with me longer than anything else, it was like watching a room full of Gatsby’s throw their last party. So in the interest of exorcism, I’ll reproduce the scene from The Conversation in which Coppola frames Harry Caul’s wonderful discomfort with the commercialized bastardization of the quality of his profession so that a few scheming, idea-stealing businessmen and women can make a few bucks

“And the haunting distribution of a million light particles from an edupunkin shall lead the way.”

Image Credit: Tom Woodward flexing his creaivity as usual with his wordpress edupunkin photo.

Yesterday I was asked by a good friend and mentor the following question: “What’s next?” And it made me stop and think, I guess since I don’t have a Ph.D. and I’m in “IT” I should be thinking about an administrative position, right? I mean you can’t be an instructional technologist forever, right? It’s just a position you take until you become a bonafide administrator or decide to head back into teaching, it’s a liminal identity that ultimately one must surrender to make more money or have more independence or have a bit more power, right?

Well, I answered quite frankly that I really don’t want to do anything else. I do not want to be an administrator, it would completely divorce me from where my particular strengths lie: getting people excited about what they do and helping them muster the courage to experiment wildly. I really, really like what I do a lot, and I think I’m pretty good at it. In fact, I’m better at it than I have been at anything else I have ever done, perhaps with the exception of watching movies. But, there’s no future in it, right?  I mean, come on Reverend, you’re an instructional technologist for Christ’s sake. I’d say 99.99999999999% percent of the population has no idea what that title means, and 99.9% of the instructional technologists aren’t too sure either. Well, that’s what I am, and the more I look around the world of educational technology the prouder I am of this fact. But thinking of how to articulate this idea was immediately daunting. I really don’t have the energy at the moment to write it all up or re-think why I need to say how this question has moved me to the point of reflection and deep consideration.

Well, luckily I don’t have to, because Matt Gold (a dear friend) did something special for me today. He pointed me to a post I wrote almost a year ago that addresses this question head-on. It’s a post I had all but forgotten about, yet he remembered it and commented upon it this very evening (when I needed it most) as if he were intentionally pushing me to re-read it–which his too kind comments actually did. So, taking my inspiration from Matt I am going to “radically re-use” my own thoughts from an old post to answer the question of what an instructional technologist is, at least in my feeble mind. (As an aside, I don’t think I have ever realized the full power of blogging my ideas regularly for the last three years until this evening, where my own ideas come back to lift my spirits in a existential moment of uncertainty and exhaustion, so thank you Matt from the bottom of my heart!)

_______________

What is an instructional technologist?

The difficulty of such a question is in many ways tied up with the larger problems with such a conference as EDUCAUSE, and actually framed quite clearly the heart of the presentation Gardner Campbell and I gave yesterday: it all depends on whether you want to focus on teaching and learning within a community or the ease and efficiency of administrating a system?

The answer to this question will ultimately decide whether or not one professor or ten professors or an entire campus is willing to use dynamic, loosely joined open source tools like WPMu, Drupal, MediaWiki, etc. If the focus is on administration and not teaching and learning than an enterprise, “turn-key” solution like BlackBoard will work perfectly. And you can spend all your time talking about the technical details of the proprietary system’s latest features or even its unbelievably bad “blog” and “wiki” building blocks, or how “open” it pretends to be, etc. I really can’t (or rather won’t) argue with anyone on this count, for the two ideas are conceptual forks in an approach to the digital landscape of education. But if and when one chooses the enterprise CMS more times than not that choice has more to do with administration than teaching and learning. And as a result of such a choice the role of the instructional technologist is effectively limited to routinized training that demonstrates the limited capabilities of any one system. All of which effectively makes the instructional technologist an administrative assistant providing technical help. It is the still birth of a profession that is still gestating. Little or no imagination goes into this process and the limits of possibility are always already defined by the technology mandated. A position that should be exploratory and imaginative is reduced to the administrative realm in the name of efficiency and doing the greatest good for the largest number.

Let me be entirely clear here, an instructional technologist should not, I repeat should not, be an administrator. To conflate the roll of an instructional technologist with administrative work is to sap it of its transformative vitality. Instructional technologists should do three things, and do them well: 1) work closely with faculty on imagining possibilities, 2) live within the latest technologies and 3) imagine and experiment with possibilities regularly. The less time an instructional technologists spends thinking about administering a system, the more time he or she can actually do these three things. This is, without question, the reason why WordPress Multi-user has been so appealing for UMW. The administrative onus is shifted to the teacher and the student. They have their own space that they control. It becomes their charge to think through the possibilities of the system, rather than being told how it works. They have to discover what works, how it works, and why it works. It is this transformative process that is all too often relegated to system managers rather than intelligent people who live in the interstitial spaces of ideas and imagination like students and instructors. It is in this liminal spaces of thinking through and imagining what such a tool can do (rather than being overly concerned with how to actually do it) that our work happens. This is when the possibilities are imagined and old conceptions and new directions coalesce and by extension morph.

In my current job I don’t administer UMW Blogs, I build community and interact with both professors and students on a regular basis. I’m not so much concerned with the technology (and if an instructional technologist isn’t—should students and faculty be?), rather I am an interested and engaged participant in the transparent intellectual life of the university. That is what an instructional technologist must do! There is no other definition that makes sense. The conversations about teaching and learning’s intersection with technology is the inspiration undergirding what has been taking place for the last several years at Mary Washington, and has in many ways fueled the transformation through a larger grass roots effort. The change starts with a conversation, not with a directive. The transformation is imagined, not administered.

Which leads me to my final musings on this topic after the presentation. The point at which I start administering systems or training folks on BlackBoard on a regular basis is the moment I walk away from this occupation. There really is no reason why anyone off the street who has read the respective CMS manual can’t do that as well as me. And I would gladly defer to them. To become an administrator and/or to fashion oneself as a leader means to often extract yourself from the actual relations that are the basis for re-imagining the space of teaching and learning. Why aren’t instructional technologists understood as something other than either one of these categories? You don’t need to be a leader to be a great instructional technologist who catalyzes change in an environment. Moreover, you really shouldn’t be administering anything because it would be taxing the invaluable time spent imagining and exploring the innumerable possibilities of these tools with faculty.

There is no question we are in an absolutely fascinating moment of flux in this field, and what becomes ever more apparent is that the role of the instructional technologist at campuses is understood as transitional at best. A job that will prepare you for a directorship, a higher degree, or some other administrative position in IT. Such a conception of this crucial role is in many ways defined by the hierarchical system of academia much like teaching and learning with technology is defined by learning management systems like BlackBoard: it’s limited in its structural imagination. While I was speaking with people at the conference about their own situations and the administrative route of academia I became evermore certain that budgets, meetings, and management more generally are important for numerous reasons, but in the end often compete with the time-intensive work of fostering conversation and inspiring imagination throughout the community more generally about teaching and learning with technology. And while the right management can foster the conditions for this conversation, the point is that what we are talking about is doing it, not constantly re-visiting the fact that technology and pedagogy “might” have a future on campus. For that is in many ways a given, it is the type of experience a professor or student imagines where a majority of the work still needs to be done. That is the invaluable role of an instructional technologist, and he or she may very well be one of the most crucial figures on college campuses today.

Yet, the position has been circumscribed and denigrated by IT directives and administrative exigencies to the point that this desperately needed space for freedom and experimentation on campuses around the world has become one of obedience, fear, and “service.” And I put service in quotes here because while my role is to serve the faculty and students, as well as to foster a community of openness, tolerance, and exploration (which I value dearly, and firmly believe is the role of everyone who works on a college campus–or in education more generally), an instructional technologist can only accomplish this in their particular field by being granted the freedom to follow their own imaginative and critical ideas about this constantly emergent space. Right now, this is seldom the case, and to be quite frank with you, I have seen the other possibilities out there, and they are meager at best. Mary Washington is one of very few models for what an instructional technology outfit should be doing on a college campus, and the UMW professors are arguably the best example of how faculty should be partnering with instructional technologists to explore the implications of the changing landscape of publishing, discourse, media, and socially created knowledge that everywhere surrounds us.

Instructional Technologists of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your BlackBoard chains!

Dave Lester did a fine job of compiling a long list of Universities that are using WPMu in one capacity or another. It’s a great list, and there are at least 40 institutions on there I had no idea about. Add to this list the work Mario Núñez-Molina did last year and add a few additions to his list and you may very well have over 100 institutions using this application. And as the recent comment on his post suggest from the University of Melbourne, there are probably a heck of a lot of international universities that are using this application that we have no idea about.

Now, Mario went above and beyond and made a slide show of screen shots for every install–I do love his fanaticism and I can completely relate He just turned his diigo bookmarks tagged wpmu_university into a slide show, pretty cool.

Yet another trend I’ve noticed with UMW Blogs is that courses and random groups are consciously publishing their articles with a far greater audience in mind than their specific class. Not only are many sites aimed at the UMW community, but also at the wide world beyond it. A great example is Uncle Lumpy’s Down-Home Art Blog and Pancake Emporium. This is a wild class experiment that has emerged on UMW Blogs wherein all the authors are blogging under personae (check out the very entertaining contributors page for a few examples). It’s a healthy mix of local art news, pancake recipes, and a Q & A column with Uncle Lumpy himself—which I think is awesome. I’m just patiently waiting for the actual arrival of the blabberized version of the Uncle Lumpy Q&A. What becomes immediately apparent is that the unknown souls behind this project are marking another trend, the conscious move of creating a news and entertainment space that moves well beyond the classroom and out to the community more generally. I love Uncle Lumpy!

One of the most interesting elements of UMW Blogs is the way in which things kinda happen on their own accord, and the publishing environment takes on a life of its own. For example, I track a lot of the posts and comments that go through the system, and what I have begun to recognize is that clubs and organizations at Mary Washington are using this space to get their announcements out by using this system to create quick and easy websites with built-in syndication.

So, why not aggregate all the announcements into one space and make things easy for the community to discover, view, and subscribe to? Well, thanks to the wonders of RSS and a WordPress spam plugin it’s a cinch. Check out the UMW Clubs and Organizations blog, which features the latest posts from contributing clubs and organizations at UMW, along with a list of the contributing groups. Additionally, if any club or organization wants to add their site (which can be hosted on UMW Blogs or any other service with a feed), it’s a simple form to fill out to get their announcements syndicated into this site.

There are some ideas that capture our imagination and provide us with a way forward or a framework for further action or study. For me personal knowledge management (PKM) and wirearchy are two such ideas. These are not my ideas and even though I may not cite the original sources in all cases that I discuss them, I give credit where it is due. I learned this many years ago as an undergraduate. I remember my History professors demanding, “Source?” whenever we made a bold  statement of fact or brought in some new line of thought. I have a link to wirearchy on my header and I ensure that I add references when I publish or distribute any work that mentions PKM. I will mention work by Lilia Efimova, Denham Grey and Dave Pollard on PKM or Jon Husband on wirearchy.

*** Update: There are some “self-corrections” in the comments pertaining to this next section [how's that for speed?] ***

On a related note, George Siemens posts that The Rhyzome Project fails to even mention the published work of Dave Cormier on Rhyzomatic Education. With the simplicity of adding hyperlinks to web pages, citing your main sources should not be a problem, and this is something that the project could rectify quickly. I wonder how long it will take to give the appropriate citations? This could be an interesting case study of the self-corrective nature of the Web and blogs.

I have blogged regularly about mapping domains on WordPress Mulit-User for over a year now.  And it is with great pleasure that I announce the first instance of a mapped domain on UMW Blogs (which is actually a mapped subdomain).  UMW’s pioneering History department has decided to create a site on UMW Blogs to build an information/community site for their department which will provide the latest news, announcements, and events for current students, alumni, etc. They have a Bluehost account where they do a lot of their own departmental experimentation  http://umwhistory.org), and they—more specifically Sue Fernsebner and Jeff McClurken—wanted to know if we could map a domain to their UMW Blogs site in order to have a URL that is in line with the logic of this space and that doesn’t have that pesky word “blogs” in it. Well, if we will it, it is no dream!

In fact, we really didn’t want to map the entire domain umwhistory.org to UMW Blogs because that would throw off all the other sites they have on various subdirectories and subdomains already. So, what we did is created a subdomain ( http://home.umwhistory.org) and just mapped that, which left all the other subdomains and subdirectories on their Bluehost account unaffected. And voila, UMW Blogs can allow people to buy (or is it lease?) their own domains and map them to their own blog space.

For me, this realizes one of the most powerful elements of a publishing platform like UMW Blogs: it re-enforces that this space is the wide-open web, not some insular, monolithic campus CMS or LMS. This feature opens up the conception and perception of UMW Blogs as the open web to some great degree; it makes people feel like the space is truly their own and that they are out there framing their own work. On top of that, they can take advantage of all of UMW Blogs’s innumerable plugins and themes, while allowing them to capitalize on our first rate service And all this without having to worry about doing their own upgrades or backups. And with their own domain name they can frame their own professional portfolio, website or blog on UMW Blogs, and should they ever need or want to export their site to another service (or even get their own web hosting account) the transition would prove that much more seamless. Mapping domains is the acknowledgment that the work people are doing in this community is their own, and the technological infrastructure should be flexible, robust, and easy enough to enable anyone who wants to control their online identities do it in the most effective and intelligent way possible. We are affording them one way to both build and preserve their personal archive of intellectual work, and we need to see the technology we choose as an extension of such an act of good faith!

OK, so how do you do it? It’s remarkably easy, first go download and install Donncha’s Domain Mapping plugin on your WPMu setup. (For server admins: to make it easy on yourself, change the documentroot line in httpd.conf to the directory where you have WPMu installed, that way any domain that points to your IP address will by default point to your WPMu installation, making the sign up process for your users seamless, and any work on your end minimal at best.) After that, I simply called up Bluehost and asked them to add a CNAME for the subdomain http://home.umwhistory.org and point it at the IP address for UMW Blogs. They had it done in less than a minute, the whole thing was really a cinch. (For more about this read the FAQ on Domain Mapping at WordPress.com.)

The latest book from Clay Christensen and his team, authors of The Innovator’s Dilemma and others, is Disrupting Class, where they examine education. Tom Haskins reviews the book and provides his own perspectives in Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and finally his own assessment on the value of college diplomas.

Tom thinks that the value of a diploma will decrease because knowledge in one field will not be enough for a generation facing multiple job changes and that the economies of scale offered by physical institutions will no longer be as obvious as they were in an industrial, fossil-fuel driven economy. I agree with Tom, and have discussed the challenges faced by universities, most recently in Moving the Ivory Tower to the Web: Part 1 and Part 2:

This is the same problem facing established academic institutions. Current revenues rest with the old way of doing business - students in classes. Going to the new Web model threatens those who make their living with the old model. Therefore leaders in the old hesitate because they are tied to their existing revenue streams. They cannot put the new inside the old. The answer is to locate the new outside of the old infrastructure and let the new unit go after customers who are not served by the current model. This way institutions can hold onto the value of their existing business for as long as possible while building up new capabilities with a different business model.

Furthermore, I would venture that many online universities are not real upstarts in this business, they are just variations on the same theme. Take local Meritus University for instance. An online BBA costs $36,000 for tuition and electronic documentation fees, compared to the average tuition at a Canadian university of $20,000 for four years. Customers pay a premium for the convenience of space and time. This model is not a great threat to traditional universities as it only targets those willing to pay more for flexibility. It may be a threat to more expensive US colleges though and that may be their target market. Still, it isn’t disruptive.

An example of the changing landscape is that participation rates in free learning programs are increasing, witnessed by over 700 members in Work Literacy and over 2,000 in Connectivism & Connected Knowledge. No one is making any money on these, except for the few students registered through the university for CCK08. This is a disruptive model of semi-academic courses being provided to mostly non-consumers (people who would not have paid for it anyway). At this time, these offerings are no real challenge to the existing structure, but acceptance of these programs may prepare the way for an upstart.

The challenge for academia will be in finding where the potential revenue is moving in the new value chain. For example, I give away all of my content on this website, because I know that my revenue is generated through consulting. This has been clear to me ever since I started. The blog helps me learn and connect and raises my profile on the Web. Charging for my content wouldn’t make any sense. Free generates the fees. How will universities be able to meet the challenge of more free content? Would they be able to compete with free tuition, even if it’s not as good? How about free accreditation?

I have some ideas about some new business models, which I’ve discussed with people such as Rob Paterson, and I’m sure that there are other people looking at this challenge as well.

As previously mentioned here… I was asked by Steve Warburton (congrats on the (nicely named) new project steve!) to do a presentation on MOOCs for the evolve community. This has sent me off on a wild tangent trying to come to grips with the implication of open education and the rhizomatic knowledge model (or, say, some people’s interpretation of connectivism) This is a weird kinda journey… but stick with me if you can.

The Third Little Pig
About 4 mornings a week my mother tells my 2 1/2 year old son the story of the three little pigs. It’s the friendly version, none of the pigs are eaten and the ending is usually some variation of ‘and they all play happily every after’. I’m often struck by the reasoning that the story attaches to the different kinds of houses that the kids build and my mother usually stresses that the third little pig builds his house out of brick ’so it will last a really long time’. He has to save up all his money (she takes some liberties with the story) so that he can go down to the store and buy all the bricks he needs in order to build a house that is impervious to, among other things, wolves.

The Second Little Pig
Our second little pig is a bit less industrious (so the story implies) than the third little pig. He goes far enough to build his house out of sticks, but it isn’t solid enough to stand up to the rigours of a blowing wolf in the old story (or the rain dripping through the roof in my mom’s version. The house is built too quickly without the rigour of the third little pig.

I’m not so sure. I see the second little pig as a little more balanced than the other two. He assesses the different options, takes his best guess at what will hold up verses what it’s going to cost… The only problem is, he doesn’t have the skillset necessary to turn his quick build into the thing that it needs to be.

Hidden Literacies
One of the interesting things about this story is that all three pigs appear to be able to build houses and they all seem to be able to acquire money and tools to build those houses. They choose to work on their own and, as they journey out in the world, they make the critical decisions that lead to two of them being a snack for a strong lunged wolf.

Rhizomatic Knowledge MOOCs and open things
In thinking about open stuff… these ideas keep popping into my head. I have a feeling that the open course is something that depends on a series of hidden literacies, and that we don’t have any sane way of talking about what they are… or, more importantly what they should be. I’m more convinced than ever, after spending the last eight weeks playing with Stephen, George and their CCK08 team that the rhizomatic knowledge model makes sense. We do kinda project a version of what we ‘know’ from a community house, and those houses are out of date as soon as they are made. But…

We are all building our houses together. And we 30-70 year olds (best guess from CCK08) are all building on a set of hidden literacies that we earned through our (what, 19 years of school for me) schooling. We have all learned to write, to read, to focus, to concentrate, to recognize strong positions when we see them, to obey power, to remember, to record … a whole stream of literacies specifically designed to build a house out of brick.

If, however, our knowledge is becoming more fluid, and transient, then we need to look to our friend the second little pig, and we need to scaffold his learning so that he can build that stick house quickly, but still JUST STRONG ENOUGH to resist the big bad wolf. It’s a different series of literacies… and the models that we are using now, for open courses, for community development, are either going to serve the brick or the stick house.

Wait, what?
The point here… is that there are two different kinds of openness out there. There is the MIT open course openness where we the penitent receive the knowledge from those in the house of brick (ha… now you see where my metaphor is going). There is no confusion here about who are the purveyors of knowledge. This knowledge has been vetted and has been traditionally confirmed… it took a long time, cost alot of money etc… This model is very well suited to the way i was taught… to the literacies listed above.

And we have the other kind of openness, where the path to knowledge is actually open. The rhizomatic knowledge model is meant to suggest that by participating we are actually in the process of creating knowledge. As a member of the community of knowledge building you are RESPONSIBLE for bringing yourself to the knowlege building experience. You are responsible for finding your own path to learning, for bringing building materials for co-creating knowledge, for measuring your own learning, for assessing your own success and for applying rigour.

Whither these literacies?

Massive Open Online Course
So when i look to this course and listen to the struggles that people have gone through in the process of following along and working with us… I wonder… how do we foster these new kinds of literacies. It’s tough for me, I was told by someone who knows me very well yesterday “easy for you, you’ve always been arrogant enough to be willing to judge your own success”.

The MOOC is a very cool thing, but it brings up all kinds of issues… one of the more interesting of which is the interplay between the ‘defined course’ and the ‘realized literacies’ of the participants. Somehow we need to talk about what we are knowing while we are learning, without it just becoming some weird meta-discussion like a couple of teenagers endlessly repeating how much their relationship is great not realizing that they’ve stopped actually living the relationship.

If we are to move forward with openning the educational system, we need to be able to deconstruct our literacies, the ones that allow us to learn, and lay out how students are going to acquire them. We also need to be honest with ourselves about which of those literacies are about brick houses (which we still need) and which are to help the second little pig make it through the winter.

postscript - don’t bring me any of your straw pigs… post has been up 5 minutes and I’ve had two complaints about ignoring the #$@ing straw pig. He’s the lazy pig. QED

Well, I guess I gotta get going on my formative 10 because what has taken me almost eight months, has taken D’Arcy Norman all of three days. I find it interesting how much a formative 10 can tell you about someone, for example given D’Arcy’s first three films it’s pretty obvious he’s a science nerd Now me, kinda like Uli, I’m a nihilist, and it is, indeed, exhausting.

Escape from New York is a no-brainer for the formative 10, this movie may very well be the most perfectly conceived plot ever filmed, and it is without question my favorite film storyline of all time. Interestingly enough, John Carpenter is responsible for two of my formative ten, this one as well as the The Thing (which I recently blogged). Moreover, Assault on Precinct 13 would have been a shoe-in for the formative 15 and I blogged it as a kind of preview to this series many moons ago. It’s interesting that this exercise has brought into sharp focus just how important John Carpenter has been in my early years of film watching, and I’d just like to thank him for helping to make me such a huge fan of the form.

So, what now? I could talk about how cool Isaac Hayes was as the Duke of New York or how much I dug the terrorists that hijacked the Air Force 1 at the beginning of the film or how Harry Dean Stanton’s role as Brain remains one of his most memorable for me (”Unless you know exactly, precisely where it is…”) or even the crazy haired sidekick to the Duke of NY who hisses in a most peculiar way. I could do all this, and I haven’t even gotten to Snake Plissken yet. Or, I could show you a series of clips that capture the essence of this film. So, OK, dim the lights and get ready for some YouTube, roll ‘em please:

The voice over (which is Jamie Lee Curits) at the beginning of the film sets up the situation brilliantly.

And here is the hissing maniac that shows off the President’s finger (love this guy!):

Scene wherein Hauk (played by the immortal Lee Van Cleef, the ultimate badass) recruits Snake for the mission to rescue the President from the prison that is Manhattan Island:

There’s the scene where the cannibalistic Mole People come out of the ground and grab Season Hubley, this was possibly the most memorable scene of the whole film for me at the time.

The Duke of NY (A#1) (played by the late Isaac Hayes) doing a little target practice with the President of the US (played by Donald Pleasance who is genius in this film, I might add).

Couldn’t find the scene of Brain (played by the legendary Harry Dean Stanton, perhaps my favorite actor of all time) on YouTube I wanted, so I will settle for when he stabs the crazy-haired hissing freak (the character is actually named Romero).

And there are many many more scenes in this film that make it simply amazing. In fact, I believe that it is still one of the best paced and consistently compelling action films ever made. Escape from New York, arguably Carpenter’s best, and maybe the last truly great American film ever made

Patrick Murray-John has been working tirelessly over the last month to realize an extremely exciting possibility for marrying the Semantic Web with WPMu, although this experiment is by no means limited to this application. What he has been doing is scraping the available data from the uber RSS feed of public blogs from the UMW Blogs Tags Site, and pulling it into a suite of semantic web tools provided by MIT’s Simile project (namely Exhibit and Timeline).

“Why?” you ask. Well Hondo, because these tools provide the means to visualize and connect the activity on UMW Blogs in new ways, check out the Timeline of UMW Blogs posts over the last two weeks here. Or look at how a tool like Exhibit provides interesting ways for creating a more comprehensive directory of users, tags, and posts (something WPMu just can’t do extensively). The alphabetized Bloggers Exhibit that has a weighted tag cloud for each letter of the alphabet which lists usernames, or take a peek at the Blogs Exhibit that does the same thing with Blog titles.

Moreover, we now have a way to collect all the images uploaded to UMW Blogs in one place, and a gallery of top ten lists for those blogs with the most images, audio files, or videos. What this means is we now have a series of alternative means for capturing and mnpulating dta for UMW Blogs that will allow us to search, discover, and make connections more easily than we could previously. We are at the beginnings of this experiment in some ways, yet in others we simply just have to style and re-theme the data accordingly and we are ready to unleash it on the UMW Blogs community to see how they use it and what value it brings to further build upon this already robust publishing platform. Is this what the trendy discussions about Web 3.0 is all about (besides the pervasive idea of cloud computing which is in many ways upon us)?  Finding ways to marry the power, ease, and usability of Web 2.0 tools with the promise of discoverability, visualization, and deep connections that the Semantic Web has promised? I guess we’re about to find out here at UMW.

Update: D’Arcy informed me that “the flickr link was just crawled by google or technorati - no magic connection.” One can dream I guess

I just got a notification of an incoming link from a Flickr photo on my blog. I have to believe this is a new feature, am I right? Probably part of the overhaul they have been working on lately. I’ve never seen a pingback from a Flickr photo before, so when this photo (shown below) taken by D’Arcy Norman (which has a link to a post of mine in the description) showed up in the incoming links section of my blog, I was pretty excited.  Think about it, we can now cite and reference blogs from within Flickr with links in descriptions to further connect these loosely joined resources online. Now, I wonder if it works in reverse as well—can you see a linkback from this blog in your Flickr account D’Arcy?  That would be the kicker, wouldn’t it?

The image with the link to a post in the description:

The linkback notification on my blog:

And interesting development to say the least, Flickr just became a whole lot more powerful in my mind.

I was a hardcore Star Trek geek as a kid. Who wasn’t, really? Captain Kirk going all maverick on the galaxy, finding cool new planets, and nailing hot alien babes. Space is cool! I think I watched every episode at least a couple dozen times - yay syndicated reruns - but for some reason it’s the first motion picture version of the franchise (released in 1979) that really affected me.

V’Ger.

Holy crap. The Voyager space probe, damaged and worn. And pissed off, looking for its creator.

So, we fire off some probes into space. We don’t have the technology to really track them, or communicate with them. 300 years later, one is found by a mechanical civilization, and taken in as an injured entity. Repaired, as well as it could be, then sent home. Hindsight makes it pretty clear that this is at least the precursor to the Borg storylines - mechanical civilizations, attempts to communicate with them, etc…

It brought up all kinds of issues that have nothing to do with science fiction - do we have a responsibility to the things we create? What does it mean to be “the creator”? What does this mean with respect to religion, theology and belief in general?

The effects in the movie are completely laughable - the psychedelic optical effects are stunningly lame compared to the film resolution digital effects of today - but the premise of the movie struck me as profound. Our actions have consequences - they may be far in the future, far away, in ways unimaginable to us now, but our actions have consequences.

Of course, the movie franchise has been mind-blowingly inconsistent. Basically, the even-numbered movies were pretty good (KHANNNNNNN!!!!! KHAAAAAAANNNNNNN!!!!!!!), the odd-numbered movies pretty much sucked, but they all feel like bubblegum pop filler. V’Ger was a game changer though.

The Institute for the Future published a report last year, that I just came across, on The Future of Work. It discusses the integration of work and technology, which of course is part of my area of focus - learning, work & technology.

Looking at a piece of the Future of Work Map (pdf) I note a good description of many of the themes and issues in my own practice:

future of work - amplified individual

Theme:
the Amplified Individual

Forecast Clusters:
Highly - Collaborative, Social; Improvisational; Augmented

Dilemma:
Collective Creation vs Individual Recognition

Signals:
Co-working Arrangements; Teamwork in Virtual Environments; Social Filtering; Life Hacks; Visualization Tools

Underlying Technologies:
Sense Making & Visualization; Ubiquitous Displays; Amplified Collaboration Tools

There is a lot of food for thought and frameworks for further discussions on the future of work and what it means to our own work. All three documents are available for free download.

Hanging with the Big Kids

Originally uploaded by Bud the Teacher

Tonight, as I picked up a mostly sleeping little girl from a car seat and hefted her into the crook of my right arm, balancing the bag of toys and clothes in my other hand, I realized that Teagan just isn’t a baby anymore.

This is a rather absurd observation, in the sense that she will turn 17 months tomorrow, and she has not technically been a “baby” for a while now. She walks. Mutters a bit. Follows instructions (sometimes). Laughs. Chews her food. Plays tricks. Dances. Has a unique personality. She is a little person, and has been for some time.

But today, I could just feel the difference. Not sure why, or why today, but it was, and is, the case. She’s bigger, and a wee bit more difficult to carry. She’s not a baby.

And every day, she’ll get just a little bit harder to carry. I’ve experienced this with my older daughter, but not with Teagan. It’s both wonderful and dreadful. And not at all easier than the first time this happened to me. I can’t begin to fathom what it’ll be like when I won’t be able to twirl either of them around, listening and watching for giggles and laughter.

While I wouldn’t trade it for anything, parenting definitely brings with it some bittersweet moments.

Being a daddy is one long process of letting go.

Here is my latest article to be published in a forthcoming edition of The Creative Educator magazine.

After thinking about Quest for Fire, I realize that another of the most formative movies for me was 1984’s The Iceman. The body of a prehistoric man was found frozen in ice, but still alive. He’s placed in a zoo-like containment room at an arctic research facility (filmed in Churchill Manitoba, no less) where he can be studied. Another fascinating movie, not because of special effects or high budget, but because of story. Any movie involving a prehistoric man singing along to Neil Young has to be OK…

The movie was about alienation. About belonging. About finding out who you are, and where you need to be. It was about human nature. It was about fear. And mythology. It was about standing up for what you believe in. And also a little about anthropology.

I remember watching and rewatching this movie several times, mesmerized by the details. And knowing that a high budget version of the movie would have lost almost everything that made this movie great.

I’m speaking in Toronto next month at the SkillSoft Canadian Perspectives conference and have been developing my presentation, which is based on this post and a previous one, on the changing role of training. The presentation is scheduled for one hour but I have taken the highlights and condensed it to less than 5 minutes, which is the time limit for Jing, which I’m trying for the first time. It’s also my first time using Apple’s keynote application.

This is an Adobe Flash file (*.swf), including audio, and should open in a new window:

21c_training

References:

Dave Snowden

Cynefin

Wirearchy

Related: Complexity, Connection & Learning by Dave Pollard

Inspired by Jim’s description of one of his 10 formative movies, I realized that one of the movies that’s had the most impact on me is Quest for Fire. The 1981 Canadian anthropological movie about 4 separate tribes of homo erectus, neanderthal and homo sapiens, and their interactions.

I remember being absolutely fascinated by the movie, watching it dozens of times (it was one of the early movies offered on our fancy new SuperChannel Cable Movie Channel when I was a kid). I haven’t thought explicitly about the movie in years, but have realized that it’s really affected me by helping to viscerally see and empathize with the various cultures depicted.

Quest for Fire was so powerful to me, because it was so real. It didn’t feel like fiction. It felt like what we would now call embedded reportage. Following the story, without shaping it. (of course the story was shaped - it’s a work of fiction - but it doesn’t FEEL like a work of fiction) It made anthropology, evolution, natural selection, adaptation, and so many other concepts clear and alive.

It showed how science isn’t a separate thing - it is the world around us. It is us.

I just bought the movie, and have been waiting for it to finish downloading from iTunes so I can rewatch it. Looking forward to it!

I’ve been feeling in a photographic rut lately. It seems like all of my photos look the same. They’re of the same thing. They’re all of things I’ve photographed before. Same. Similar. Again. Repeat. Done it. been there. Oh, that again. Gottit…

I just popped onto the Photography tab of my blog, and it hit me - although things feel strongly similar, there is variation and diversity. And sometimes repetition of similar photographs and subjects tells a story in and of itself.

the last 12 photos

Disrupting Class is definitely in my top few from the past few years.  The book has changed the way I think about education and education change.  It has provided a road map for the future.  Models to experiment with, and a clear way to test those models of change.

I want this post to be short and sweet, so here’s a quick list of highlights.

• Christensen defines how businesses are displaced by disruptive technologies in the theory of disruptive innovation: The MiniComputer by the PC/MAC; The SLR camera by the The Kodak point and shoot camera; and the vacuum tube radio by the transistor radio.  Christensen sees that online learning that is customized by the learner style is the future and predicts that “by 2019, about 50% of high school courses will be offered online” (p. 98).
• We should all be offering online courses to our students and testing alternatives in our existing schools is places where there is no competition such as APs and/or classes that are not offered already.
• To truly see the change, we will need to have school created outside the dominant system, such as charter and private schools where schools can be left to experiment and define this new type of schooling, find success and then bring it back to mainstream schools.  His business example is the Toyota Prius that was created in an external business unit and then brought back into Toyota’s factories to be built.

When I look back, a number of books fit in the changing my lens on education: Good to Great helped me see the importance of leaders and structures of successful organization planning; Now, Discover Your Strengths helped me see my strengths and how to best use them; Cluetrain Manifesto and The World is Flat helped me see the power of openness and how Internet communications have changed the world;  In A Whole New Mind, Dan Pink helped me see that the types of skills traditional schools teach are the building blocks, but not the end game skills that our students need; and now Disrupting Class has has given me the lens of effective organizational change.  All of these books provide unique and simple ways of looking at problems, clear and articulate writing that include stories as examples, and significant basis in human development and psychology.

Christensen ends the book by stating,

“These technologies and organizational innovations are not threats.  They are exciting opportunities to make learning intrinsically motivating, that make teaching professionally rewarding, and that transform our schools from being economic and political liabilities to sources of solutions and strength.

Thanks, Clayton Christensen, for inspiring me.  I look forward to testing your theories.  Thanks to Vinnie Vrotny for the recommendation.

For all of you, head to Amazon and pick this one up.

I’ve disabled WP-Super-Cache on UCalgaryBlogs.ca because it was doing quirky things like showing the anonymous front page after someone logged in, etc… And, with our low load and mostly logged in users, it really wasn’t necessary.

Except for the RSS feeds used to generate the Recent Posts and Recent Comments sections on the front page of the site. Without WP-Super-Cache enabled, the front page (and ONLY the front page) took glacial epochs to load, as the RSS feeds were generated, parsed, and embedded. I wanted to be able to cache the feeds, without having to throw the switch on caching the entire site.

Then it hit me - it’s trivial to set up a cron job to curl the feeds to static files periodically, and then I could just use those static files to generate the Recent blocks on the front page. Duh…

So, I modified the crontab on the server to add these two lines:

*/15 * * * * /usr/bin/curl "http://ucalgaryblogs.ca/wpmu-feed/" > /home/commons/webdata/ucalgaryblogs.ca/postsfeed.xml
*/15 * * * * /usr/bin/curl "http://ucalgaryblogs.ca/wpmu-feed/comments/" > /home/commons/webdata/ucalgaryblogs.ca/commentsfeed.xml

So, every 15 minutes, the sitewide Recent Posts and Recent Comments feeds are updated. I use the static files to generate the display on the front page, using the web-visible URLs for the files at http://ucalgaryblogs.ca/postsfeed.xml and http://ucalgaryblogs.ca/commentsfeed.xml respectively.

Sometimes, it’s easier to just pull out another tool from the server toolbox, rather than trying to find a way to do it within WordPress all the time…

• Barry Levinson: The Future of Televised Debates - Annotated

  Change the word DEBATE to EDUCATION in this post, and you have a….

  “How-NOT-to Use TECHNOLOGY in the CLASSROOM” post.

  Very worth a read in that context.

  But I’ll leave that softball for somebody else to clobber. It’s pretty obvious to me.

  tags: education, technology, elections08

  • This was a hyper-version of a TV debate. Turbo-charged. The screen, in addition to the actual debate participants, is filled with information. On the left and right sides of the screen they have boxes where various talking heads can cast points as the debate is in progress, and at the bottom of the screen there is a graph responding to a specially selected group of “undecided” voters — the up and down movements of the chart, resembling some kind of EKG, show their feelings to every sentence that is spoken. One color for Male. One color for Female. Obama says something and points register on the screen. Paul Begala liked the comment. William Bennett was unmoved. And so the debate went on. At one point I realized I was no longer listening to what was being said by the candidates. All the bells and whistles had my attention.
    • Really - read the whole thing, and think about its lesson to tech-drunk teachers.

      Don’t get me wrong: I know there’s a place for edtech. But there’s also a TOO MUCH of it. - post by cburell

  • Television has never found an idea it can’t exploit. It doesn’t matter what it is. Anything that can be made more lively, is more lively. Tweak it, make it more fun, and we will watch. And we will like it. And we will justify it.

    Some say we are in the early days of the American version of the fall of the Roman Empire. Therefore, is television the electronic version of the Roman Circus? The events at the Coliseum might be cruel and inhumane, but those leaving the arena sure had a good time. Taste and consequence be damned. “That Christian sure was fast, best I’ve seen in weeks! Let’s go to the baths.”

  • But the CNN debate innovations are just the beginning I think. Maybe the real debate event will adopt some of those CNN bells and whistles. Include them in the process to enhance the drama. Maybe even add a truth panel that rings a buzzer when a candidate says something false. Depending on the degree of misinformation, that will determine the point deductions. Buzzers going off have always added fun to quiz shows in the past and refs have used them for dramatic effect during sporting events. There are so many possible improvements that can be made. Content? Forget it. There’s too much fun to be had in flashy presentation. After all, the band played on while the Titanic sank.

• Shelly Palmer: Obama Would Create Cabinet Level Technology Officer

  One for the edtech groupies

  tags: technology, education, politics, elections08, obama

  • If elected President, Barack Obama would create the first-ever Cabinet level Chief Technology Officer. Obama thinks that the US is not doing nearly enough to create jobs in the tech sector and believes an executive position would better the situation. Google CEO Eric Schmidt must agree, as he is endorsing Obama.

• Keli Goff: Thank You Rush Limbaugh (and Pat Buchanan)

  Really interesting conclusion on this one. Are the likes of Limbaugh and Buchanan finally being left behind by an America that’s outgrown them? Let’s hope so.

  tags: racism, elections08, culture, history, usa

  • Conservatives Rush Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan both sought to tie Powell’s endorsement to his race.

  • Instead of diminishing Powell’s reputation at all, Limbaugh and Buchanan’s words have so far, only further diminished theirs. Watching clips of their comments I actually felt a great deal of compassion for both men. Clearly their frustration and fear at realizing that our country is no longer what it was in 1968 — and never will be again — or even what it was in 1998 when it was paralyzed by partisanship, has rendered both men lost; as though a time machine accidentally stranded them, in some strange, multi-cultural, forward-thinking universe, and they as relics from the past feel increasingly, irrelevant, outnumbered and out of place.

    But I believe that I am not the only one who feels sorry for them. There are plenty of Americans, even those who may not agree with Obama’s politics, or Powell’s endorsement, who heard the sad rhetoric of these men and thought to themselves, “That does not represent me or the America that I believe in.”

    And for sparking that revelation, I want to say to Rush Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan, THANK YOU.

• Service: Online Only: The New Yorker

  A photo that should become iconic. Read the tombstone closely, including its symbol.

  tags: iraq, terrorism, bush, racism, 911, islam, usa

  • 

• Bob Ostertag: Colin Powell, Barack Obama, Specialist Khan, and You - Annotated

  tags: no_tag

  • The fact that it was, finally, an African American Republican Army general who finally stood up and denounced Republican Muslim-baiting as un-American is not surprising. Rather, it highlights the ambiguous role of the US military, which has so often been a tool of oppression beyond our borders, yet was one of the first major American institutions to racially integrate domestically, long before schools (not to mention churches which remain highly segregated to this day).
    • That point about churches is really interesting. It’s easy to understand neighborhood churches being segregated, but people now drive long distances to go to mega-churches and whatnot. So I wonder what stories people have about segragation attempts in their churches?

      Experience in international schools has shown me that self-segregation seems a common instinct among people as well (or is that just too much time in Korea lately?). - post by cburell

  • one reader wrote “call me a bigot but as a solider I feel gay don’t belong in the army, but u wouldn’t understand unless u served,” which resulted in this shockingly eloquent response:

    I am an American.
    I am an Army veteran.
    I am a gay man.

    I have heard all too often that “good Americans” (meaning people not like me) have served and died in order for people like me to lead a life that people like you might describe as being other than truly American. The fact is, people like ME — good, decent Americans — have served and died so that people like YOU can imagine living in a world of intolerance and discrimination. People like ME have served alongside people like YOU.

    This country belongs to ALL OF US !

    • Powerful statement. I never knew anybody (openly) gay in the South, where I grew up. Moving to L.A. opened my eyes to what has continued to be true in my experience over the subsequent 25 years: gay men have always been far friendlier and compassionate than the Bible-belt Southrerners that surrounded me in my childhood.

      It’s good to hear this gay veteran set the record gaily forward. - post by cburell

• Karen Heller: Obama’s forte: Cool competence | Philadelphia Inquirer | 10/21/2008 - Annotated

  I love how the 24/7, everything is recorded and archived and easily retrievable media is shaping up to be a FORCE THAT KEEPS POLITICIANS HONEST. (Or at least more careful.)

  Check out this journalist’s use of McCain in December versus McCain in September.

  It’s one of a million examples of how ridiculous candidates can make themselves look if they veer too far from their historical record.

  Anybody have the video on these interviews? A simple splicing of the raw footage into a 30-second clip would be a sure viral hit.

  tags: elections08, media, youtube, mccain, palin, obama

  • But economics is not McCain’s, you know, thing.

    “The issue of economics is not something I’ve understood as well as I should,” he said in December. A month earlier he mentioned that, with a vice presidential candidate, “you also look for people who maybe have talents you don’t, or experience or knowledge you don’t, as well.” He said he’d look for “somebody who’s really well grounded in economics.”

    Oops. Palin’s talent is energy.

    • If anybody mixes a video of these two interviews ending with the announcement of Palin as running mate, let me know. - post by cburell
  • Barack Obama remains calm in the most heated moments, a tremendous palliative for an anxious electorate. And he’s learned about the economy, which makes McCain’s resistance to do so appear arrogant and foolish.
    • EDUCATORS should love this insight: Obama HAS shown himself to be a “life-long learner” on this front. He really does seem to do job-related homework - which is probably why it’s so easy for him to stick to the issues high-road: he studies them, and can talk about what he’s learning.

      After the proud “I DON’T READ” (or worse, “I READ CAMUS’ EXISTENTIAL NOVELS”) Bush/Cheney years, an intellectual (and a writer) for president seems somehow fantastical. That’s how bad America has become. - post by cburell

  • The more Palin talks, the more it’s clear that governing her state is inadequate experience for the vice presidency. That’s because Alaska is rich in resources, flush in capital and scarce in residents, the absolute inverse of the nation.

    The McCain campaign’s talk about grassroots organizers, domestic terrorists and socialists is suspect. If you are a cynical person, you might say that such chatter stokes racial anxieties without mentioning race. If you’re an optimist, you might believe that most Americans are better than that.

    • This woman’s journalism is so lean and compressed. She’s an analytic laser-beam. - post by cburell

• McCain’s Davis Raps Obama’s “Secret” $300 Million - Marc Ambinder

  tags: no_tag

  • A day after Barack Obama announced his record $150,000,000 September fundraising kitty, McCain campaign manager Rick Davis said that if Obama didn’t make his small donor database public, he’d be violating the standards of transparency his campaign has set.

• Barack Obama turns rivals’ words on them in Florida - Los Angeles Times

  McCain was, by his own definition these days, a “socialist” himself when he opposed Bush’s “Republican socialism” for the wealthy in ‘01 and ‘03, before flip-flopping to support it in ‘06.

  tags: elections08, mccain

  • Soon after, the Democrat used McCain’s words to turn back his criticism of Obama’s tax plan. The Arizona senator has said his rival would cripple the economy with a massive tax hike; Obama said his plan would cut taxes for 95% of working families, raising them only for the richest Americans.

    “It’s true that I want to roll back the Bush tax cuts,” Obama said. “John McCain calls that socialism. What he forgets, conveniently, is that just a few years ago, he himself said those Bush tax cuts were irresponsible. He said he couldn’t ‘in good conscience’ support a tax [cut] where the benefits went to the wealthy at the expense of ‘middle-class Americans who most need tax relief.’ That’s his quote. Well, he was right then, and I am right now.“

    McCain voted against Bush’s tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 but supported their renewal in 2006, saying business and investors needed “a stable and predictable tax policy” to sustain economic growth.

• Republican socialism — baltimoresun.com

  Great title. McCain wants to extend Bush’s “Republican (NOT “conservative”) Socialism” for the wealthy.

  It’s argued clearly below.

  tags: elections08, mccain

  • It’s hard to understand the logic of Sen. John McCain’s charge that his Democratic opponent’s proposal to cut taxes for Americans earning less than $250,000 a year is socialism. Sen. Barack Obama wants to redistribute the wealth by taxing the rich and giving to the poor, Mr. McCain complains. But a look at recent tax and income statistics tell a different tale. It is the rich who have been earning more and paying a smaller share of their income in taxes in recent years while middle-class and poor families have struggled with stagnant income and an unrelenting tax burden.

    Truth be told, it’s mostly wealthy investors who are enjoying the benefits of socialism these days in the form of hundreds of billions of dollars in government loans and investments designed to rescue banks and other financial institutions and avert a catastrophic failure. The U.S. government hasn’t nationalized banks, but it has come close with its interventions and guarantees for eight big lenders.

• McCain: Obama a job-killing socialist - INQUIRER.net, Philippine News for Filipinos

  Remember how Bush beat Kerry by seizing on Kerry’s use of the word “global” in the last debate? And how he distorted Kerry’s use of the word - he meant it in the sense of “systematic” or “nuanced” - by claiming Kerry meant he wouldn’t lead against the will of “global” opinion?

  I remember how aghast I was to see this obvious distortion grow legs in the last weeks of the election, when anybody with a vocabulary and the ability to read Kerry’s sentence including the word could see that wasn’t his meaning. And I remember how disappointed I was that the media didn’t correct this obvious ploy at all.

  Below, we see McCain doing the same thing with Obama’s comment that he wants to “spread the wealth around” by increasing taxes on the over a quarter million dollars a year set, so the other roughly 95 percent of us wouldn’t carry as much of the tax burden.

  McCain and ex-Bush campaigner Rick Davis (JM’s manager)